napster

     

Napster was an online music file sharing service create by Shawn Fanning while he was attending Northeastern University in Boston and operating between June 1999 and July 2001. It was the first widely-used peer-to-peer sharing service, and it made a major impact on how people, especially university students, used the Internet. Its technology allowed music fans to easily share MP3 format song files with each other, thus leading to the music industry's accusations of massive copyright violations. Although the original service was shut down by court order, it paved the way for decentralized peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, which have been much harder to control. The service was named Napster after Fanning's nickname.

Trivia about napster

  • While a student at Northeastern, Shawn Fanning started this P2P music-sharing service that now gone legit
  • In 2003 Tech TV took a "First Look" at the new fee-charging version of this music service